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What is PPTP?

PPTP stands for Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol. Confused already? OK, we’ll start from the very beginning, and explain what a protocol is.

What is a protocol?

A protocol is a common set of rules and instructions which need to be adhered to. A less technical example might be if you’re invited to have tea with the Queen of England, as you would be required to follow a certain protocol when meeting Royalty. You have to know when to bow/courtesy, and how to address her (Your Madge simply won’t do!) you need to know which spoon to stir with and which fork to eat with. By the way, the correct way to address the Queen is “Ma’am” to rhyme with ‘jam’, not rhyming with ‘farm’. If protocol isn’t followed correctly, you’ll probably be asked to leave.

When computers communicate with each other, the same applies – if the rules aren’t followed – everything stops. This set of communication rules is called a protocol. Going back to our tea party, imagine if the other guests consisted of various diplomats from around the world - Japanese tea protocol may be very different to that used by the Germans, and so knowing which one to use is vitally important.

Just as we communicate with one another in different ways, the same applies to how computers communicate with each other – there are many different protocols, such as HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). All these different types of protocols follow different rules and perform different functions. For example, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer security protocol) provides a secure connection between internet browsers and web servers, allowing you to transmit private data online in a secure way.

What is PPTP?

One way of looking at PPTP would be to imagine a motorway going from Point A to Point B. That motorway has lots of flatbed trucks driving up and down, carrying things that need to be delivered to either Point A or B. Now let’s further imagine that we’re in a helicopter looking down – and as these flatbed trucks have no roof, it’s easy to see what they’re transporting.

PPTP does something a little special though, as it creates its own ‘tunnel’ to send its trucks down. From our helicopter we can see that there’s a new tunnel going from A to B, but we’ve no idea what’s going through it, if indeed anything is going through it at all. All we know is that there’s a connection between two points. The rest is hidden from view.

In the same way, when a user wants to securely connect to their work network from a hotel or public Wi-Fi, they don’t want other people to be able to see what they’re doing and so they use a PPTP VPN, to create an encrypted ‘tunnel’ for their data.

A VPN is a secure internet connection established between your internet service provider (ISP) and our internet service provider. When you use a VPN ALL of your online activity is ‘encrypted’, so any attempts to break into your internet connection to steal private and confidential information will be futile because your internet traffic is securely hidden behind the VPN.